Members' responses to organizational identity threats: encountering and countering the Business Week rankings

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 1996 by Kimberly D. Elsbach, Roderick M. Kramer

We also analyzed respondents' and records data statements that offered explanations of the rankings. We collected 554 statements from interview and records data describing reasons for and responses to the rankings. This analysis produced a preliminary typology of tactics that members from the eight schools used in response to the Business Week rankings. These tactics primarily took the form of organizational categorizations (i.e., highlighting a school's membership in a category). These categorizations appeared to be used to affirm their perceptions of their organization's identity to make sense of the rankings. For example, in responding to a poor ranking, a member might make a statement highlighting the "product" categories that defined his or her school but may have hurt it in the rankings, such as "we're a research-oriented school" or "we're dedicated to producing technical MBAs." Through further analysis, we defined four primary cognitive tactics members used for identity affirmation and sensemaking: (1) selective categorizations to highlight alternate identity attributes, (2) selective categorizations to highlight alternate comparison groups, (3) selective categorizations to excuse a ranking, and (4) selective categorizations to justify a ranking. Four researchers analyzed the data during these iterations to define these tactics. Two researchers confirmed the classification of each identity-affirmation or sensemaking tactic. Strong evidence for a tactic was indicated if most of the respondents or records data in a category (i.e., students, administrators, or faculty) used the tactic.

Middle iterations. In our next iterations, we analyzed data about the eight schools' identities during the five years prior to the 1992 Business Week rankings. We did this to provide a benchmark against which to examine members' identity affirmations or sensemaking responses. We searched for members' statements about their school's unique and defining characteristics from each school's 1987-88, 1989-90, and 1991-92 business school catalogs and biographies in Business Week's 1988 and 1990 editions of The Best Business Schools. We focused on statements from members that roughly fit the prototypes: "our school is an X type of school," "our school is different from most schools on dimension X," "a central dimension of our school is X," or "we have always been a type X school." We collected a total of 844 identity statements from the eight schools (between 60 and 200 statements from each school). We grouped these statements iteratively to determine the central, distinctive, and enduring dimensions of each school prior to the 1992 rankings. We retained only those dimensions that consistently appeared in publications over the five years analyzed (i.e., were included in every publication), including the year prior to the first Business Week rankings.

Later iterations. In our final iterations we looked for relationships between members' reactions to the rankings and their identity-affirmation or sensemaking responses. Extrapolating from individual-level research, we anticipated that members' perceptions of identity threats would predict the strength of their responses (Steele, 1988). We thus searched for trends in the quantity and quality of cognitive responses for schools whose members exhibited a high or low degree of threat to identity perceptions. We also searched for other predictors and trends in members' identity affirmations.